He has lived for millennia. Shortly after civilizations began to settle on the earth and believers started to raise their temples. He lived alongside many of those humans; he lived with those gods they worshiped. He trained with their children, equals just like him.
Being children of the gods was no easy task, neither in those times nor in the ones to come.
Now, hundreds of years later, in front of the carved rock in a lost temple, he cannot help but admire the precisely polished image—much more precise than he ever thought possible to see, and so well preserved despite the abandonment and decay of the place.
Three figures, one after the other, arranged by height. His fingers trace the details; his breath catches in his throat. It is almost as if he could touch them, as if they were standing right in front of him. Even though so much time has passed since the last time he saw them in person, he still remembers their voices, their gestures, the laughter.
He loses himself in the piece again; he does not want to miss a single detail of the artwork. He almost seems to want to devour it until he is satisfied, but deep down, he knows: he won't be able to, because a simple sculpture could never replace flesh and bone.
He traces the image of his own sword carved into the frozen stone and looks at himself: a little younger, more naive, more… happy. With that serene expression he rarely wore on his face, usually looking annoyed. Always exasperated when that pair was with him, but deep down, he adored them.
Even though the stone held no color, he knew every shade perfectly, and exactly where it should be painted. The blue-green color in the eyes for one, a brilliant electric blue for the other. Black and blonde for their hair; fair and tanned skin that created an amusing contrast with his pale olive skin tone when they, stubbornly, forced him to stand in the middle under the pretense of protecting him. The scar on the mouth of one. The laurel wreaths painted in yellow and teal. Their purple and orange capes.
He fell to his knees and held back an agonizing sob. His eyes ached, his body ached, his soul felt heavy. He struck the stone wall again and again, so many times until his hands burned; but the wall would remain there, a reminder of his past days, of the adventures he lived by their side.
He missed them; he missed them much more than he could ever admit out loud.
But Jason and Percy betrayed him.
He can still feel the terror of those years.
Zeus's master bolt was stolen, and no one had any idea from where or who could have taken it.
He remembers the screams, the earth shaking, the natural disasters—the product of gods accusing one another, searching for a culprit—and when there was no one left to point at, it was the figure of Hades that shone like a torch in the midst of the chaos.
“Hades stole it!” someone shouted.
“He was always jealous of Zeus's reign,” another reasoned.
Zeus, blinded by his rage, pointed to his brother as the sole thief. Though arguments were made, though Hades proved he couldn't have stolen it, the king of the gods did not relent.
A command that changed his life completely: the children of Hades were to be hunted down if the bolt was not returned.
He feels bile rising in his throat the deeper he loses himself in those memories.
The first few weeks, he managed to hide without trouble from all those gods hunting him down. He always found a way to do it, but he also had a limit.
Shadow-traveling had left him exhausted; he could barely stay on his feet. A cave was the only relatively safe place he found to gather his strength. He could hear the crashing of the waves and the rumbling of the skies. It was a bad idea to hide there, but he couldn't think of anything else.
His eyes were closing from fatigue; he wished to sleep... until he heard footsteps at the cave's entrance, footsteps he could distinguish even beside the Fields of Punishment.
Jason and Percy were there.
In front of him. Watching him.
Percy's eyes shone with the same brilliance as Greek fire; Jason's jaw was clenched so tightly that his sword gave off sparks of electricity. For a second, he believed they had come to help him, to defend his father, to protect him just as they did during their battles, the same way they swore to do despite the complaints he snapped at them back then.
Percy unsheathed his sword; the scent of salt and ozone filled every corner of the cave like a death sentence.
The Nico of the present vomited until his insides burned, until panic so thoroughly numbed his senses that he nearly blacked out.
Percy and Jason had come to hunt him.
His best friends were going to turn him over to Zeus.
He remembers feeling so much fury, so much pain; the despair overwhelmed him to the point that he remembered nothing after seeing their faces.
He woke up days later in his room within his father's palace, bandaged and aching, with ichor staining the black sheets as a reminder of his sorrow.
No one wanted to give him an explanation of what happened, but from the rumors he heard, he had transformed into something that even the monsters of the Underworld couldn't name. He attacked the sons of Zeus and Poseidon until they were left badly wounded, and then he fled the place.
Zeus was furious; he wanted Nico's head. Hades did not allow it; his son had defended himself in self-defense.
A war was on the verge of breaking out until the truth was revealed: an outcast son of Hermes was the cause of everything—the theft, the fighting—a plot engineered to bring back a Titan. Kronos himself. A revenge against each and every one of the gods.
When the bolt was returned to its owner, things settled down. Zeus barely apologized, too proud to admit his mistake.
But the damage was already done.
Nico never saw either of them again.
Nico never heard from Jason and Percy ever again.
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